One of the new liberal arts is the art of the counterfactual. We cribbed the idea from Niall Ferguson; here’s a new one from him:

It was not that Obama’s New New Deal — announced after the Labor Day purge of the Clintonites — produced an economic miracle. Nobody had expected it to do so. It was more that the federal takeover of the big banks and the conversion of all private mortgage debt into new 50-year Obamabonds signalled an impressive boldness on the part of the new president.

The same was true of Obama’s decision to fly to Tehran in June — a decision that did more than anything else to sour relations with Hillary Clinton, whose supporters never quite recovered from the sight of the former presidential candidate shrouded in a veil.